Youth review – Chinese dancers endure fall-outs, heartache and burst blisters
Feng Xiaogang’s sprawling drama lays on the Spielbergian syrup and covers swaths of China’s history in broad brushstrokes – but it carries a potent message
There is perhaps a spoonful of sugar too many in this bittersweet Chinese drama from blockbusting director Feng Xiaogang. It’s an an ambitious, sprawling, novelistic beast of a movie that opens amid the tantrums and broken hearts of young dancers in a cultural division of the army in the mid 70s. Xiaoping (Miao Miao) is the troupe’s new girl, determined to make fresh start after a difficult childhood. But her colleagues, sensing she is vulnerable, mercilessly mock Xiaoping for crimes against sophistication (she pads her bra out with sponges). Xiaoping’s sole defender is saintly Liu Feng (Huang Xuan), a young man possessed with such superhuman goodness that he chivalrously lances the puss from one dancer’s blisters. Years pass, and the movie takes in political upheaval, idealism lost and China’s bloody war with Vietnam – none of it in quite enough detail to feel satisfying. Feng has been called the Chinese Spielberg, and while not exactly sentimental, there is something contrived and soft-focus about Youth. That said, it does have difficult and honest things to say about bullying: that perpetrators often swan off into the sunset, comeuppance ungotten, while victims can find themselves targeted all over again by a new set of tormentors.
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